If you’re not familiar with the story behind the above picture, let me learn you something. That’s incumbent (at the time, obviously) President Harry S. Truman holding up a newspaper declaring his defeat to rival Thomas E. Dewey. Problem is, Dewey didn’t win. The Chicago Tribune let speculation (and their own personal bias) get the better of them in what turned out to be an EPIC FAIL.
The Tribune, and media in general, mostly learned their lesson. Don’t report your story until the facts are certain. But one entity continues to create stories based on no facts whatsoever year after year: the preseason AP poll.
Of course, it doesn’t claim to be fact, only a collection of opinions. So it’s unfair to declare it “inaccurate.” But it’s just as inaccurate to call it true. So let’s just call it what it really is: absolutely pointless.
I single this poll out from all the others for two reasons:
1. It’s more than just “good fun” as it actually affects which teams play for the national championship.
2. There’s currently a story about how the Florida Gators have made “history” by receiving the highest ever percentage of first place votes in the preseason AP poll.
This is the equivalent of a high school newspaper writing about how Darren “Hotstuff” Timmers got the most votes ever for “Most Likely To Succeed” in the senior yearbook. It’s just a guess to begin with, so who cares that the highest ever percentage of guessers guessed Florida? They could wind up not even winning the SEC, just like Darren could find himself working at 7-11 to pay for his morbidly obsese wife’s diabetes medication.
Let me be clear that I’m not hating on Florida. Sure I’m a passionate USC fan, but even more than that I’m a fan of college football in general. And watching Florida play is just fun. Considering the team won last year’s national championship, returns its entire starting defense, and only lost one huge playmaker on offense, the hype is well deserved. They very well might run the wire and win another national championship. And that will actually be history-making, unlike this current “accomplishment.”
It’s telling that I had no idea USC was the previous “record holder.” for getting 95.4% of the votes back in 2007. They actually got four more 1st place votes than Florida because back then there were 65 votes instead of today’s 60. While the ESPN article explains this, I feel it necessary in a post that starts with a tale of journalistic inaccuracy to point out their smaller blurb under the video that incorrectly states: “The defending champion Florida Gators received the most first-place votes ever in this year’s preseason AP Top 25 poll.”
But again, I’m not upset that Florida has stolen this “record” from USC. Like I said, I didn’t even know USC had it. But what’s ever more telling of how pointless this “record” is is that I HAD to have known two years ago, when I’m sure the media wrote all about it. I read anything and everything USC-related, so I must have read this and forgot about it in the subsequent two years. Sort of how I’d forget about a particularly good burger I had from Jack in the Box. Sure, I like when burgers are good. But I’m not going to write a news story about it.
Unfortunately, I don’t know whether to blame the AP poll of ESPN for this ridiculousness. So I’ll just go on hating both of them.